Context Engineering: The Key to Mastering AI Language Models

If you’ve ever wrestled with getting your language model to hit just the right note, you’re not alone. Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke and ex-Tesla/OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy are betting that success comes from something they call context engineering. To Lütke, it’s a core skill, while Karpathy describes it as the art of feeding your model the perfect mix of information—nothing too scant, nothing too cluttered. Too little detail can throw your model off, and too much can bog it down and spike your costs. Even when models boast huge context windows, drowning them in extraneous data can mute their performance. It’s a bit like telling a story: you need enough substance to captivate your audience without overloading them with unnecessary details.